NASA has scheduled the 62nd flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter and tasked it with achieving a new speed record for a rotorcraft on Mars.
Ingenuity set a record with each flight – adding one to the number of flights made by (known) helicopters sent by humans to the Red Planet.
This helicopter was initially only planned to fly five times, as a technology demonstration. Two and a half years later, the plane is still flying – and is scheduled to do so again on Thursday.
NASA’s flight plan called for the craft to climb to 18 meters and traverse 268 meters in 119.3 seconds, at a speed of ten meters per second.
Registration has poured Ingenuity’s flight logs into Excel and crunched the data, so we conclude that Flight 62 will exceed Flight 60’s top speed of 8m/sec.
Flight 62 would rank 24th for distance traveled, and 34th for duration, according to our calculations.
We last covered Ingenuity in July 2023 when it called home after landing in a location that prevented it from making direct contact with the Perseverance Rover. He relies on these contacts to contact Earth, making phone calls a major problem. The aircraft has flown nine times since then, with flight 61 on October 5 setting a new altitude record of 24 meters.
Yes, dear reader, that means vehicles designed to complete operations more than two years ago are performing better than ever before. This is an extraordinary result for any system, anytime, anywhere – let alone the extremely harsh Martian environment.
It seems like it’s fast season on Mars, as Perseverance recently set its own speed record, when it moved 347.7 meters in one day – without human intervention.
Ingenuity’s record attempt will start and end at Airfield Tau. NASA describes its goals as “Science target imaging” and “Expanding the flight envelope.”
“Inspiration” wouldn’t be amiss to add to that list of goals. ®
2023-10-21 23:36:32
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